Don't Let Go
by piresntsukino
Summary: Bombs flying, social order collapsing. After everything, this truly was the end.


He slowly made his way along the street, trying to ignore the person curled up in his arms, trying to ignore his surroundings, with bombed out buildings, some of them still burning, purple fingers of smoke reaching up into the sky like a drowning man looking for a final hand to cling onto. What a shame he wouldn't find it. Both their clothes were ripped, and their skin torn; hers more than his. One could see the gory, bloody maw of her flesh in places where her skin had completely shredded away. It would have made him sick, if he hadn't seen the things he had seen. Now it just made him feel empty.

The siren attached to a nearby building began to sound, or at the very least, tried to. The noise that came out of it was quiet and choked, and died out almost immediately. The PSB had installed them everywhere to warn of incoming planes from the SEAUn, from the people he'd utterly convinced Sibyl was evil and needed to be eradicated. He hadn't meant for it to go this far, and yet it had.

" _That's the siren," she spoke up once the familiar wail sounded out, reverberating off the buildings that were still standing. In the short time after they met again in Japan, a short while after the attacks first began, she had considerably hardened even more than she had when they encountered each other on the Shambala Float. After being convinced of his innocence a second time, they formed their own team again, just the two of them. They didn't ask about anybody else. The answer was obvious. "We'll have to get to a shelter again. Come on." He hadn't moved from his place in the window, just watching the city and regretting every action he'd taken since he left her in Shambala. "Shelter?" Without another word, she grabbed his arm and began to drag him away. "I thought you were smarter than this," she joked. "You're lucky to have me around. I'll look after you." Though her tone was light, her words were quite serious indeed._

He continued his slow but steady pace through the streets, reaching the outskirts, onto a big open field. Soon, images of buildings strewn about like broken teeth in a burnt jawline were replaced with views of a slightly overcast sky and long grass swaying in a near non-existent breeze, and for the final time, he left the smouldering city behind him. Looking down, he could see that blood was still trailing from the hideously open wound on her hand onto the ground, and he clenched his teeth together, resisting the urge to cry. It wasn't like him to cry, and he wasn't going to do it now.

He delicately edged his way around another dead body of the guerrilla army – again, he would have been horrified, but he was used to it, and sightings of the deceased had little to no effect on him nowadays – and carried on walking. Barely blinking.

" _Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?!" his voice came out harsher than intended as they both raced down the street, towards a group of teenage boys kicking a terrorist who was a little younger than them. It was evident he was dead – a scarlet pool had formed around his head, and the prime cause of that was probably the bat one of the boys was clutching on to. He would have confiscated it, but it was most likely their only form of self-defence. Or in this case, offence._

" _We're playing soldiers," one answered with creepy innocence._

" _Well, stop. You better leave here right now before you catch some hell," her voice was as equally angry and scary as his was, perhaps even more so. The kids looked at each of their facial expressions before fleeing. Once they were out of eyesight, she relaxed next to him, and walked over to the boy soldier. At most, fifteen. Not even that. She knelt by him and closed his eyes. "I've always thought that you should be nice to latent criminals, and maybe even criminals." She stared at the boy, who could have been sleeping. "You never know how much they understand."_

At that point, a rain cloud passed overhead, a buring, searing rain which cut even more into his flesh. He placed her body on the floor, which looked surprisingly serene and placid even in death; even more than she was in life. In life, she had always worn a near semi-permanent frown, and her smiles were all strained. Probably because of him. He moved himself over her and shielded her from the acid's sting, trying to ignore it biting into his back. He knew it was over for him, and he'd never cared much for a dignified death either. But still, he wouldn't let anything else desecrate her body more than it had been.

In his own moment of weakness, he remembered one they had shared together, not two weeks previous to him acting as a human shield for her. For her corpse.

 _They had been staying in a small hovel that was easily overlooked by enemies of all kinds – whether it be persistent, Sibyl-dominated drones (the terrorists had yet to find their mark) or the planes swooping overhead and unloading bomb after bomb onto the city – and just observing the destruction from afar. For a while, they had fought long and hard against it, trying to just balance things out again, but had come to a rude awakening that they really were helpless. They had tried not to cave in, but it became impossible to fend off machines hundreds of metres in the air who could kill them with the greatest of ease. She'd taken to staring out the window instead of him and regretting, thinking of all the lives she couldn't save. Not just from now. From long before as well._

 _After a while she'd crawled back over to him, and sat by him for a while. "Hey," she muttered softly, her voice unnaturally weak for her. "When this is all over…" she'd leant her head against his shoulder, and he thought she was going to start weeping, but she didn't (because the time for tears had long since passed). "Take me somewhere that glitters."_

It was when night had fallen that he finally summoned the strength to continue his short-lived journey. It wasn't long before he reached his destination. Just a little more….

His arms and legs ached terribly, and he was so pitifully weak now, weaker than he ever had been before in his life. Yet he'd always possessed an ironclad will, as she had, so he couldn't stumble at this final hurdle. So he plodded on with her still lying limply in his arms.

Finally, he reached his destination, and placed her down softly on the grass, as if she was a fragile china doll. That wasn't who she was at all. In recent years, her skin had turned from porcelain to ivory, to the thickest steel. She was no longer the fragile person he had abandoned. He reclined on the grass next to her, recalling the events of the night before. She was still alive then.

 _Curled up in another hovel, which was just as unnoticeable as the first, they were gazing out of the window. The sky was practically empty, but one couldn't see the stars. And even in their deplorable situation, she found a way to smile at him, and encourage him. "You know what I think?" she broke the comfortable silence between them. "I think this will be over soon."_

" _Why do you think that?" he peered down at her._

" _Because there's only one bomber," she explained._

" _Then I guess I'll be taking you to the place that glitters soon," he smiled at her._

" _I look forward to it."_

 _Then the world had exploded into an eternal white._

The stars above them glittered brightly, almost hopefully, illuminating their faces, reflecting his steel grey eyes. Subconsciously, his hand reached for hers – even though being dignified in death wasn't a huge deal for him, he always believed dying alone was the worst thing to happen to him. Though her fingers didn't move anymore and couldn't return the reassuring squeeze, it comforted him. He'd fulfilled one promise to her, a thing which he never had been able to do before.

With no more drive to do much of anything anymore, he suddenly felt a strange kind of exhaustion. With a smile, his eyelids slid down over his vision.

Shinya Kogami and Akane Tsunemori laid there, hand-in-hand, with only the stars to witness their passing.


End file.
